Las Vegas Weekly

How Steven Wright changed my life

“What’s another word for Thesaurus?” Steven Wright brings his strange, wonderful observations to the Orleans this weekend.

One of the seminal moments of my life was seeing Steven Wright on a “Young Comedians” special on HBO in the 1980s. He was getting huge laughs on small, random observations—“Well, you can’t have everything; where would you put it?” “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” “Yesterday I saw a guy with wooden legs and real feet.” Fact is, I’d had these types of thoughts all my life but never felt comfortable expressing them. But here this guy was, unkempt, seemingly disinterested, with the most monotone delivery I’d ever heard in my life, and he was … so damn cool! Suddenly life came into sharper focus for me—it was okay to have these thoughts, even share them. So I did, usually to the sounds of crickets. But I couldn’t have cared less. The world is to be observed, even if your observations are … a little weird.